Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

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Chapter 5: Lowell

of the three authors most widely associated with old Cambridge, only Holmes and Lowell were born there, although its associations became a second nature to Longfellow, who was born in Maine, while that region was still a part of Massachusetts.

Lowell felt, even more thoroughly than Holmes, the influence of his Cambridge surroundings, because Holmes went to Europe for his medical training (1833) at the age of twenty-three and never afterward lived in his native town, though always near it; while Lowell was continuously a Cantabrigian, with only occasionally a few months of absence, until his first diplomatic appointment. Fredrika Bremer told him that he was the only American she had seen whose children were born in the same House with himself; and he was also of the yet smaller number who die in